Forced and coerced sterilization now a serious crime in Canada, but racist attitudes prevail
After years of advocacy, activists have succeeded in strengthening the law in Canada on forced and coerced sterilization (FCS), but it’s unclear when, or if, the practice will stop.
On 15 June 2026, the Governor General gave royal assent to Bill S-228, which amended the criminal code to designate FCS as aggravated assault, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Sterilization is a surgical procedure to prevent conception, done by blocking, clipping, or tying a woman’s fallopian tubes. It’s considered to be permanent. Forced or coerced sterilization (FCS) is when the procedure is performed without the patient’s free, prior, and informed consent.
As many as 15,000 Indigenous women have been sterilized in Canada since the 1890s, according to one support group, along with men, other women of colour, the disabled, transgender people, and women deemed mentally unfit.
Shockingly, at least one case happened as recently as 2025, according to the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice. The organization says it’s working to create a registry of survivors, run healing and wellness programmes for survivors, and advocate for measures to prevent FCS and reproductive injustice.
[Note: The following paragraph was corrected to clarify Harmony Redsky’s availability for an interview.]
Harmony Redsky, Executive Director of the Survivors Circle, was not available to be interviewed for this article.
Just as FCS is not an issue from the distant past, it is not confined to Canada. Procedures were done in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the United States, often targeting Indigenous women but also other minority groups and people with disabilities or mental illness.
The practice violates the right to security of the person guaranteed by section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as the United Nations (UN) Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and other international laws.
Sterilized without consent at 14
Passing S-228 “was a victory, a sad one and a ferocious one,” says Morningstar Mercredi, who was sterilized without consent at the age of 14. At least six months pregnant after being raped, she admitted herself into hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan one day after falling, then spotting and cramping. A doctor performed a caesarean section without consent from the girl or her parents, then removed her left ovary and fallopian tube.
“To date I do not know what happened to my baby,” Mercredi says in a phone conversation broken by long silences. “To me, this is a story of how we got to bill S-228 becoming law at the cost of generations of lives — literally,” adds the co-author of Sacred Bundles Unborn, a collection of articles about FCS worldwide.
Mercredi was among the survivors and allies who worked with Senator Yvonne Boyer, advocating to update the criminal code, more than a decade after the senator began looking into reports of Indigenous women being sterilized at a hospital in Saskatoon.
Senator Boyer declined to be interviewed for this article.
Survivors in Saskatchewan have filed a class-action lawsuit against the province’s health authority on behalf of Indigenous women who were sterilized without “proper and informed consent” after delivering in hospitals. Similar class actions have been filed in other provinces, including Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec.
Boyer’s work prompted a Senate investigation into FCS. “For much of the 20th century, laws and government policies explicitly sought to reduce births in First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, Black communities, and among people with intersecting vulnerabilities relating to poverty, race, and disability,” says part 2 of its report.
“Though these explicit eugenic laws and policies have been repealed, the racist and discriminatory attitudes that gave rise to them are still present in Canadian society, and forced and coerced sterilization still occurs.”
The report recommended the government develop a plan to gather data on the extent of FCS.
On 15 June, Boyer wrote on her website: “Today Bill S-228 received royal assent and is now law across Canada; making sterilizing someone against their will an aggravated assault in the Criminal Code. Thank you to the survivors who guided this work and to the allies who supported them. We have changed the course of history.”
Forced and coerced sterilization globally
A recent academic paper documents forced sterilization of Indigenous women globally. Those targeted were considered “subhuman”, “inferior”, or “undesirable,” it concludes. FCS was used in many countries globally, including:
In Peru, where at least 300,000 women were targeted from 1996 to 2000, under the government of President Alberto Fujimori. (Incidentally, his daughter Keiko was sworn in as President on 28 July). 92% of those sterilized were Indigenous, says Lucia Stavig, assistant professor of global health governance at Indiana University-Bloomington
To pre-empt opposition, the government sold the initiative as a family planning programme, but it coincided with a deadly civil war during which the state labelled Indigenous people as the enemy, says Stavig during an online interview.
[Note: The following paragraph is corrected. It originally read “… Indigenous Indian peoples were…”]
“Forced sterilizations in Peru happened at the tail end of our internal armed conflict, where Indigenous Andean peoples were seen as terrorists. And so we can also understand this as part of a larger counterinsurgency campaign.”
Other theories have been offered to explain FCS. Stavig points out that in Peru, and other countries worldwide, Indigenous peoples have legal right to communal collective land.
“So if those lands are literally inalienable — you cannot sell them to people outside of your community — how do you, as a government, which wants to make land concessions to mining companies, to oil companies, etc... how do you get people off their lands?
“This is kind of crass,” Stavig adds, “but what does forced sterilization do that murder doesn’t? What forced sterilization does, particularly in Indigenous settings, is tear the ties that bind.
“If you’re thinking about what it means to be Indigenous, it’s living on the land, but it’s also the kinds of relationships you have with your land, with the other humans in that area, with the plants, animals, all those sorts of things.”
According to Mercredi: “One person being sterilized discontinues hundreds of thousands of people. Let’s just look at seven generations forward. One person hypothetically has five children, and those five children have however many, and so on. Seven generations — how many people were eliminated effectively through sterilization?”
Survivors in both Canada and Peru have described how sterilization not only prevented them from having more children but resulted in husbands or partners leaving. In some case, the women’s new status cut them off from their communities by excluding them from sacred rituals.
Stavig says that a major court case challenging the sterilizations, similar to a class action, was filed in Peru in 2003 but then stalled until 2021. “It was reopened in 2021, re-closed in 2024. It has never even been allowed to go to court.”
“Violations of Indigenous women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights served colonial goals.”
— United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples
In March this year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), found against the government of Peru in the case of Celia Ramos, who died after being sterilized in her village in 1997. Ramos had an allergic reaction during the procedure, which the health facility was unable to treat. She was transferred to a larger centre, where she died 17 days later.
The state’s policy “was implemented through coercion and threats exercised by public officials who received incentives to recruit women, who were pressured to undergo permanent contraception procedures in exchange for benefits or through the use of information about alleged health risks that had not been substantiated,” said the court.
“Although Ms. Ramos Durand signed a document before the procedure, it was obtained under coercion, without adequate information about the risks, alternatives, or consequences of the surgery being provided to her,” added the IACHR.
In Greenland a report released in 2025 documents testimonies from more than 350 Indigenous Inuit women and girls (some as young as 12) who were fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs) between 1965 and 1991. Only 47 of them provided informed consent for the procedure.
Greenland was a colony of Denmark until 1953; in 2009 it became a self-governing territory. The sterilization campaign was launched as officials feared over-population on the island.
The report includes testimony from a woman fitted with an IUD when she was 14: “While we were at school, someone came in and said: ‘Girls, you need to be examined.’ We were taken to the hospital. We didn’t know what was going to happen. When we got to the doctor, they said: ‘Take off your clothes. We’re going to examine you down there.’ I had never been touched down there. It was very uncomfortable. It hurt a lot, and I started to bleed.”
In 2024, 143 Inuit women sued Denmark saying health authorities violated their human rights. Just before the report was released last year, the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland apologized for the programme.
In the United States as many as 70,000 Native American women were sterilized after the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970. History professor Brianna Theobald estimates the number could represent 25% of women of childbearing age, or more from 1970 to 1976.
Earlier this year New Mexico became the first state to formally investigate the scope and impacts of sterilizations that took place in hospitals from 1907 to 2018. ““They were trying to eradicate us from our communities. They acted with malice in every single case, I’m sure you will find,” said Senator Deb Haaland, an Indigenous woman.
A commission will identify all federal facilities in New Mexico that conducted the procedures, interview Native women targeted, compile a review of reproductive health services in the state, and offer recommendations for policies to address any inhumane treatment.
While sterilization programmes targeting Indigenous and other women occurred in numerous states,the one launched in the then colony of Puerto Rico in 1937 is notable. As the economy nosedived after the Spanish-American war, US President Franklin D Roosevelt sought solutions.
By the 1970s, one-third of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized, most without having consented to a change that they were told could be reversed, reports Ms Magazine.
Not long after, Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs for development of the birth control pill, when strict US laws excluded researchers from experimenting with American women. The Puerto Ricans weren’t told the drugs were being tested. “As the trials continued, 17% of the participants dropped out due to serious side effects like vomiting, breakthrough bleeding, and congestive heart failure.” Three women died.
In California from 2006 to 2010, at least 144 people were illegally sterilized during labour and delivery while in custody in women’s prisons, most of them Black and Latina women. Most were not told that they had been sterilized, says the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.
In 2022, the State of California established a compensation fund for survivors of the practice, but since then more than 75% of applicants have been denied reparations, according to the compensation board.
The response to forced and coerced sterilization
While FCS has continued in some countries, there has been a response globally. In 2015, United Nations agencies released a statement affirming that sterilization should be: “free from discrimination, coercion, and violence, and... based on the full, free, and informed decision-making of the person concerned.”
In its 2024-2025 session, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues urged the UN Human Rights Council to set up a commission of inquiry to document the global impact of FCS. The HRC’s annual discussion on Indigenous Peoples is scheduled for the 63rd session, in September-October 2026. A report has been submitted to it by an independent expert on the human rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Titled Historical and contemporary forms of violations against the sexual and reproductive health and rights of Indigenous women and girls, the report finds: “Throughout the colonial world, Indigenous women and girls have been subjected to systematic violations of their sexual and reproductive health and rights, which were often justified through racist ideologies portraying Indigenous Peoples as inferior, uncivilized, incapable of self-governance, or unfit to raise their own children.
“Whether the objective was territorial acquisition, labour exploitation, population control, assimilation, religious conversion, or resource extraction, violations of Indigenous women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights served colonial goals,” continues the report.
In May, phase 2 of a report about FCS in Quebec was released. It collected testimonies about 97 cases of “obstetric and gynaecological violence” from 1957 to 2023, including 57 cases of what it called “imposed sterilization” (”without consent or without informing the woman”).
“The report highlights a pattern of differential treatment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women, with very similar patterns across First Nations and regions, demonstrating the presence of systemic racism in Quebec’s health and social services system,” says a press release.
On 29 July, the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice delivered the first session, in Alberta, of a training programme it developed for frontline health workers caring for survivors of FCS.
“It provides historical context, survivor-informed perspectives, and practical guidance for engaging with survivors in respectful and supportive ways,” says a press release. “We want to work with all physician and nursing colleges to prevent further systemic racism from continuing to be a healthcare reality.”
That is an ambitious aim. A national study released in July reported that among 309 Indigenous participants, 63% reported experiencing at least one form of mistreatment during childbirth, while nearly 75% reported disrespect.
“The data reveals egregious violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights within health-care settings, exposing the profound failure of health-care systems to uphold the protections affirmed in international human rights law,” said Dr. Wanda Phillips-Beck, associate professor of nursing at the University of Manitoba and lead author and co-investigator on the study, in a press release.
The Canadian Medical Association, which supported Bill S-228, says it will “continue to advocate” on FCS, but Senior Media Advisor Eric Lewis said he had no details on how that would happen.
“Don’t you think that it’s insidious?” asked Morningstar Mercredi during our interview. “The people we go to to save our lives are the ones denying our lives. There’s no shortage of racism in hospitals and the healthcare system.”
Making the law effective will be a challenge, she adds, both for the legal system and for survivors, who will have to relive their trauma when they file a case. But Mercredi says at least survivors now have a base to move forward systematically.
“Does (the new law) mean it will stop? No. It’s happening somewhere right now. But people will think twice now that it’s enacted,” she added.